As the group panics and plans their first of many slapstick escape attempts, viewers are blessed with the most anticipated character return in What We Do in the Shadows history, if not television history.
“Who the fuck are you and how the fuck did you get in here?” Nadja yells at a mysterious chap who appears in their living room shortly after Laszlo exited it.
“What a pleasure to meet you, young lady. My name’s Daytona. Jackie Daytona. And I hail from Tucson. Tucson, Arizoña,” the dandy replies.
Ladies, gentlemen, and vampires: he’s back…albeit 66 years in the past. You will undoubtedly recall Jackie Daytona’s debut in the season 2 episode “On the Run,” in which Laszlo flees his home and then the show unrelatedly picks up with a separate character named Jackie Daytona, a normal human bartender in Tucson, Arizoña. You may even mistakenly remember that Laszlo was Jackie Daytona in disguise. But that’s simply impossible: Jackie Daytona has a toothpick in his mouth and Laszlo does not.
This brief glimpse from the 1958 “Vampires” documentary isn’t the only Jackie Daytona appearance in the episode either. As Guillermo expresses concern that their show’s ending won’t be satisfying, Nadja turns towards the cameras and hypnotizes us, the viewers, into believing we’re watching the “most perfect ending you could possibly imagine.” It turns out that the most perfect ending we could possibly imagine is simply the ending of 1995 crime thriller The Usual Suspects. After meeting with an enigmatic witness named Colin Robinson, Detective The Guide glances at her police corkboard and realizes that the entirety of the story he just told her was improvised by the evidence pinned to it including a Jackson Daytona nameplate.
While viewers get their perfect ending, Guillermo gets an imperfect but still satisfying conclusion. Nandor can’t resolve Guillermo’s fear of the unknown but he can invite him into his coffin for the first time…that now doubles as an elevator down into a subterranean crime-fighting cave with a supercomputer.